Nonbelievers: Beware Nov. 7

[Anymouse]

November 7 is Billy Graham's 95th birthday. Since 2012, his organisation has signed up over twelve thousand churches in a special crusade for his birthday.

The idea is those churches are to identify the non-believers in their communities (my village won't have a problem with me living right across the street from the church and the token atheist in the village government), and invite them on that date to in-home dinner, to evangelise them.

His Website teaches those who would do this how to be "Matthews" (evangelists). Since no one in town has ever invited me to dinner, and the church across the street is part of this programme, I will have something else to do that day. Perhaps invite someone to my house for dinner to preach the Gospel of Reason.

Beware November 7.
http://www.goddiscussion.com/110148/over-12000-churches-sign-up-for-massive-in-home-crusade/

[LostOne4Ever]

1. Good to know

Ill make sure to bring my Nintendo 3DS and headphones for when I eat the free food!

What? I have no issue with fundies wasting their money on feeding me as opposed to actively trying to destroy the separation of church and state

Not that I expect to get one invite /hermit

[Curmudgeoness]

2. I don't expect to get invited,

but it is a good thing to know about, just in case.

I am not marking this on my calendar.....someone please warm me closer to November, please.

[DetlefK]

3. Memorize some atheist arguments and prepare to ask "How do you know?" a lot. Then get kicked out.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. Alternative things to celebrate on Nov 7th:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_7

1665 – The London Gazette, the oldest surviving journal, is first published.
but, these days at least, it is purely a publication with formal announcements, like government appointments, granting of probate for wills, notices of bankruptcy and so on, so not much to celebrate)

1775 – John Murray, the Royal Governor of the Colony of Virginia, starts the first mass emancipation of slaves in North America by issuing Lord Dunmore's Offer of Emancipation, which offers freedom to slaves who abandoned their colonial masters in order to fight with Murray and the British.
emancipation of slaves - good; fighting with the British against colonials - not so good, for you guys anyway.

1916 – Jeannette Rankin is the first woman elected to the United States Congress.

1917 – The Gregorian calendar date of the October Revolution, which gets its name from the Julian calendar date of 25 October. On this date in 1917, the Bolsheviks storm the Winter Palace.

1967 – Carl B. Stokes is elected as Mayor of Cleveland, Ohio, becoming the first African American mayor of a major American city.

1989 – Douglas Wilder wins the governor's seat in Virginia, becoming the first elected African American governor in the United States.

Births:
1728 – James Cook, English navy officer, explorer, and cartographer (d. 1779)
1867 – Marie Curie, Polish chemist and physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1934)
1913 – Albert Camus, French author, journalist, and philosopher, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1960) (ie 100 years ago this year)
1943 – Joni Mitchell, Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist (ie 70 this year)

I suggest you go with the 100th anniversary of Camus:

It is in fact the process of creating value through rebellion that Camus believed we could create value for all humans, overcoming the absurdity of the universe. Creating value, however, is achieved through our commitment to values, both personal and social. Traditionally many have believed that value must be found in the context of religion, but Albert Camus rejected religion as an act of cowardice and “philosophical suicide.”

An important reason why Camus rejected religion is because it is used to provide pseudo-solutions to the absurd nature of reality — the fact that human reasoning fits so poorly with reality as we find it.

http://atheism.about.com/od/existentialistphilosophers/a/camus.htm

[Anymouse]

7. Thanks for the info.

I will have to dig around for more interesting things that happened on November 7th besides Billy Graham.

[BillStein]

5. 95?

Well, as they say Only the Good Die Young

[defacto7]

6. If he dies Nov. 6th... then what?

[Anymouse]

8. They will likely . . .

. . . do this to celebrate whatever the Evangelical equivalent of sainthood is.

[defacto7]

9. It's called congress. n/t

[muriel_volestrangler]

10. So, did anything much happen?

I saw one DU thread, in LBN, about Graham giving his 'final sermon', bemoaning the state of the USA.

As a reply, Fred Clark points out "The awful state of American evangelical Christianity after Billy Graham":

This is a picture taken this week at the celebration Franklin Graham held for the 95th birthday of his father, Billy Graham. It is also a parable, a metaphor, an astonishingly revealing snapshot of the sorry state of evangelical Christianity in America in 2013.



Just look at how Franklin has exploited his father here. The famous preacher is silent now, a voiceless prop called upon to lend a sheen of respectability to the likes of Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, and Rupert Murdoch and his Fox News lackeys.

To his credit, Billy Graham looks uncomfortable being dragged out to offer his apparent blessing to a gaggle of dishonest strangers and charlatans that includes two racist billionaires. The scowl on the old preacher’s face may reveal his recognition that this is what has become of his legacy — that everything he did and worked for has led only to this, to the empowerment of lying hucksters and the politics of resentful privilege. Perhaps he’s even realizing that something like this was bound to happen — that the intensely otherworldly focus of his lifelong ministry meant that it couldn’t plant deep roots in earthly soil.
...
White. Rich. Right-wing. Dishonest. Predatory. Outwardly pious, inwardly corrupt.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2013/11/09/worth-1000-words-the-awful-state-of-american-evangelical-christianity-after-billy-graham/

Clark, if you don't know him, is a liberal 'evangelical' who has more or less given up using the term because of the charlatans and bigots in the movement. Well worth reading (his magnum opus is a detailed weekly demolishing of The World's Worst Books - the Left Behind rapture nonsense), even though he's a Christian.

And someone did post a thread about Camus: http://www.democraticunderground.com/101678063

[Heather MC]

11. The Assumptions they make are insulting, as if we didn't make a rational intelligent choice

And there is something they can say that we haven‘t heard before.

[sakabatou]

12. Ah, we don't have any of that shit here

Too progressive